The iPhone 5 went on sale in China on December 14. Apple announced over the weekend that in only three days after that launch it has sold 2 million iPhone 5 smartphones. Apple also reasserted that the iPhone 5 would be available in more than 100 countries by the end of December marking the fastest iPhone rollout ever.

“Customer response to iPhone 5 in China has been incredible, setting a new record with the best first weekend sales ever in China,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “China is a very important market for us and customers there cannot wait to get their hands on Apple products.”

Despite the successful rollout, Apple shares fell 3.8% in trading on Friday after the iPhone 5 debuted in China. Citi Research downgraded Apple stock from "buy" to "neutral" and lowered Apple's price target from $675 to $575.

Citi Research blamed diminishing hype for the iPhone 5 and improving competition in the smartphone market.

Apple sold over 5 million iPhone 5 units in the weekend of its launch in the U.S. and 8 other developed markets. An estimated 2 million iPhone 5 units were sold at U.S. carriers in the first 10 days of launch or 1.0% penetration of a post-paid subscriber base of around 200 million. In a shorter time span of just 3 days, Apple sold over 2 million units at China Unicom and China Telecom, a 1.5% penetration of a 130 million 3G subscriber base. This suggests potential for subscriber penetration in China could be similar to that of developed countries despite per capita GDP that is less than 1/5 of the U.S.

As usual if you want to see a data based analysis Horace Dediu at Asymco is your man.

In this post Horace places the announced 2 million iPhone sales in a weekend in context.

Amongst several interesting points Horace points out that the first weekend sales of the iPhone 5 in China exceed the first weekend sales of the iPhone 4 in it's initial launch countries of US, France, Germany, United Kingdom and Japan.

I thought it was obvious what it meant but to spell it out for you: It means the iPhone 5 launch in China was very, very strong and that Apple will continue to grow it's business in China very strongly over the next year.

Another piece of context. China is a disaster for Google. Almost all Android handsets sold are both low end and stripped of Google services including Google Play, and there numerous and incompatible apps stores which makes life very difficult for developers. This is an interesting article on this issue.

"Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine." -- Bill Gates